The term “marathon” comes from the legend of Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who ran roughly 40 kilometers from Marathon to Athena to report the Persians had been defeated in battle. Since then, marathons have become popular, competitive endurance races — standardized at 42.195 kilometers (26.22 miles) from 1921 onwards.

Until last Sunday in Macau, that is.

Organizers of the Macau Galaxy Entertainment International Marathon acknowledged this week that the Dec. 2 race was three kilometers too long. You’d have thought that the 31st marathon staged by the former Portuguese enclave would be the charm, but a wrong turn by two runners led the entire field astray, competition director Chan Pou Si told the Macau Daily Times.

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“It was planned that the athletes should turn left,” Mr. Chan was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “Instead, the two leading ones turned right, and the other 2,000 runners followed them.”

Mr. Chan noted in the interview with the paper that the race’s 5:00 a.m. start – one hour earlier than in 2011 – and rain may have caused the mistake, but added that runners should have known the course.

The wrong turn also impacted distance in the half-marathon, which shared the same course.

A spokeswoman for the Macau Sports Development Board told China RealTime that she wasn’t certain that all runners in the marathon and half-marathon ran extra distance. She said the body has decided finishing times will not be changed to reflect the glitch.

“The result we will keep as what you see on the website,” she said. “We follow the usual practice of the international federation, so we keep the record as what we have already announced.

A shorter fun run called the “mini-marathon,” originally set to be 4.2km, also ended up going long. The cause in that race was a mistake by a volunteer signalmen, who steered runners along a route that caused them to add a full kilometer to their short course, the spokeswoman said.

This year’s race, run mostly in the dark and in a driving rain and headwind, was won by Haile Haja Gemeda of Ethiopia in a relatively slow 2:23.56, after Stephen Chemlany of Kenya set a 2:12.49 course record last year. The women’s marathon winner was Ehitu Kiros Reda, also of Ethiopia, at 2:50.10. The women’s course record of 2:31.48 was also set last year.

The winners of the men’s and women’s marathon each take home $25,000. Men or women breaking the course record by a minute or more add a $15,000 bonus or an extra $10,000 for breaking the record by less than a minute.

Wikimedia Commons

A statue of Pheidippides along the Marathon Road in Greece.

Shortly after the race, results went up, and howls of protest began on message boards in nearby Hong Kong, where many runners had come from. Hong Kong is about 70 minutes away from Macau by high-speed ferry. On the HKRunners.com board, runner “mikec” noted, “right at the start of the race when we left the stadium I am not sure if we were led the wrong way but we ran straight into a barrier across the road. Then the first 1K marker was at least 2k plus. After that, all the kilometer markers were inaccurate. The gap between the 37 and 38 was only about 500m.”

He wrote that he wore two distance watches. His Garmin GPS watch measured the distance he ran at 43.8 kilometers, while his Polar GPS watch recorded it as 44.1 kilometer.

An apology appeared on the official race website, with co-organizers Macau Galaxy Entertainment, the Macau Sports Development Board and the Macau Athletics Association issuing their joint “regret for the technical error (that) happened in this year’s marathon.”

“The Organizing Committee has already conducted a review to all aspects of this year’s event, and promises to take effective measures to make improvements to the event and to provide better racing conditions for all participants,” the statement said.

(Full disclosure, the author of this post ran in the Macau half-marathon. His Garmin Forerunner GPS watch recorded a distance of 22.4 kilometers, roughly a kilometer longer than the typical distance.)

While grouching about the race glitches, runners on the Hong Kong message board seemed to take things in stride. They, at least, fared better than poor Pheidippides. As the legend has it, he collapsed and died from exertion after finishing the world’s first marathon.

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